The present invention relates to a bulk packaging material, a packaging unit made from it, and a process and apparatus for producing them.
In packaging breakable articles such as glass, ceramic or the like, or precision mechanical instruments and machines, it is known to fill the space between the applicable article and the shipping container or box with volume-filling packaging material. Expanded shaped parts such as plastic chips are used, for example, as the bulk packaging material. Plastic filler material of this kind must be manufactured separately, which is expensive, and it must be destroyed again in some way, which for certain types of plastic causes considerable environmental pollution. It is also known to use wood shavings as the packaging material, but such material is not easy to handle, because it is not a pourable material. Furthermore, even wood shavings must be made separately from a raw material that would be used in some other way. A packaging material made of helical linear strips of paper, made by wadding up a packaging paper drawn endlessly from a roll of paper, and cutting it up, is also known from British Patent 1,300,816. Once again, such packaging material is not ecologically sound, because it is made from new packaging paper. Furthermore, these helical paper strips form a fairly interconnected mass, because like wood shavings, the strips tend to catch on one another, so that once again, this packaging material is not pourable.
A packaging unit is also known from German Utility Model 87 16 083, which comprises a wrapper or paper and chopped straw or the like poured loosely into it. In this packaging unit, the wrapper is embodied either as a cohesive, matlike pad made of two sheets of paper placed upon one another and stitched in a checkerboard pattern, or in the form of a single pad made from a double strip of paper whose loose paired edges are joined together. Pads of this kind are complicated and expensive to manufacture and to fill. Moreover, if it is to hold chopped straw, the paper for the wrapper must be especially sturdy and must be provided with an especially sturdily bonded edge to prevent the chopped straw from piercing the paper. If the chopped straw did pierce the paper, it could escape through the tiniest opening, which can cause problems, particularly in the case of machines provided with air openings, packaging parts shipped in grease, and the like, if the chopped straw gets into the bearings of such machines. In other words, a packaging unit broken down in this way into its individual parts not only involves work for the receiver of a shipment containing this packaging unit but may also cause damage.